Eisenhower Presidential Library
For ten days Jackie met with Royal Air Force officials about her flight and took occasional calls from local cosmetic manufacturers. She also met with Pauline Gower, head of the female ferry pilots flying for the Air Transport Auxiliary. The ATA recruited pilots who were otherwise unfit to fly with the Royal Air Force because of age, gender, or some physical handicap. If a pilot could fly with one leg or a missing eye, he was fit for ATA duty; the pilots themselves joked that ATA stood for Ancient and Tattered Airmen. These men and women flew planes between factories and air bases so combat pilots could focus on combat duty. Jackie’s flight had cleared the way for the ATA girls to ferry bombers as well as smaller planes, and she was amazed to find it wasn’t a small group, either. There were dozens of female ATA pilots doing a vital service, and their number was growing. It was a model she thought was worth bringing back to the United States.
After her brief tour in England, Jackie caught a ride home on a B-24 with a dozen other pilots. Packed in like sardines, they took turns lying on the makeshift floor of wooden planks to look out the window and smoked a dwindling supply of cigarettes. After landing in Montreal, Jackie went right back to New York, where she changed into a proper dress at her Manhattan home before an impromptu press conference. Leveraging her publicity, she told the gathered media of her intention to write a report recommending that the US Army Air Force set up a female ferrying program. There were surely hundreds of female pilots who, with a little training, could do for the United States military what the British women were doing for England. It would be a worthwhile preparation in the event of war. Then, exhausted, she told her staff she was going to bed and that she was not to be disturbed by anyone except the president of the United States. Kidding aside, she intended to sleep in her own bed until noon.
The next morning at nine o’clock, the phone in Jackie’s apartment rang. It was someone from the White House on the line asking if Jackie would please join President Roosevelt, his wife, Eleanor, his mother, Sarah, and Princess Martha of Norway for lunch in Hyde Park. One mad dash through her closet and a police escort later, she sat down with her esteemed company.
She told the president how the RAF was utilizing women pilots in the war effort. The American War Department, she knew, was only recruiting pilots who could be trained for combat, which excluded women by default. Nevertheless, she thought it prudent for America to consider some equivalent program, a ferrying or support role from women pilots. Following a presidential order to determine what that role might be, Jackie ended up in the office of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds, head of the Air Transport Command. Olds hired her as a dollar-a-year volunteer tasked with finding him 100 female pilots each with 500 hours in the air. But Jackie had something bigger in mind.
There were some 2,000 licensed women pilots in the country. Off the top of her head, Jackie could think of a handful who would happily join a women’s corps. If she could recruit a small group, they could start changing attitudes about women flyers and lay the foundation for a larger program. She knew they would face prejudice as she had from the RCAF, the so-called “woman driver” problem. Men who held the view that women were inherently weak, unable to take criticism, and prone to tears wouldn’t want them flying. Most Army Air Force brass assumed a menstrual period made women unstable and therefore unsafe in the air. But flight instructors knew otherwise. The few men who consented to train women found them more measured and balanced than hotshot male pilots who refused to admit weakness. Social bias also forced women to work that much harder. The result was often a better pilot. Jackie figured she could find enough women among her own contacts to form a core group within a month. This first group would be trained to lead the next recruits as the women’s corps expanded. Eventually, the women would be split by skill and type of plane, giving them a presence throughout the country.
For the moment, though, Jackie knew she had to be careful in how the program was initiated. So other women weren’t accused of “taking bread out of pilots’ mouths” as she had been in Montreal, Jackie wanted her pilots organized on a temporary basis with the understanding that they would not interfere with the male pilots’ combat roles; the women would step in when men were unavailable or needed elsewhere. It would be an experiment aimed to change the minds of the men in charge. Though this women’s corps would be subsidiary to but affiliated with the Army Air Force, Jackie wanted them held to the same disciplinary and training standards. They should have uniforms, ranks, promotions, and even sleep in barracks just like their male counterparts. And of course, they would have to be compensated fairly. Once the women had proven themselves as capable as men, which she knew they would, she could fight for their militarization not as women but as pilots. They would thus work on a civilian basis until they could be properly militarized.
Jackie recommended all this to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds, who formalized the recommendation to the US Army Air Force, adding that Jackie be the leader of the eventual program. No one blinked at the suggestion. The top AAF brass considered her perfectly qualified, and some noted that her name alone promised the publicity needed to get the program started. With this first bit of momentum, both Jackie and Robert began reaching out to various women’s groups. The War Department, meanwhile, put out a call for women pilots to submit their flying history and credentials.
By the fall of 1941, Jackie realized Robert was moving ahead without her. Though they’d agreed on a methodical, organized recruitment program to ensure positive publicity and good results, Robert was hiring women without structure and assigning them to jobs on an as-needed basis. Frustrated, Jackie went to see her friend Hap Arnold—now chief of the Army Air Forces—and was dismayed to find that he didn’t see the need for a women’s program at all. Hap argued that, for the moment, there was no pressing national need to free up male pilots for combat by recruiting women. Jackie countered that it was worth being prepared. She urged him to start training women so they would be ready, but the fact remained that Hap had neither the need nor the planes to begin training a group of women. Fortunately, he knew someone who had both. Air Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, head of the Royal Air Force delegation in Washington, was in desperate need of pilots for the British ferrying division. Hap sent Jackie to see him, and she agreed to bring a group of American women to England to work with the Air Transport Auxiliary on the condition that she be released from her contract the very instant the US Army Air Force needed her to set up a training school for female pilots at home.
* * *
On the first Sunday in December 1941, the seventh, Hap Arnold was taking a break. He’d just returned from Hamilton Field in California and was spending a pleasant morning quail shooting with airplane manufacturer Donald Douglas in Bakersfield. As the men returned to the cabin, they found Donald’s father sitting by the car listening to the radio.
“The Japanese have struck Pearl Harbor!”
Details were scarce. The earliest reports said that the Japanese had sunk American battleships, destroyed airplanes, and generally decimated the area around Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. As the day wore on, the full scale of the attack became clear. Hundreds of Japanese fighter planes had damaged or destroyed nearly twenty American naval vessels and more than 300 airplanes. More than 2,400 people had died, and an additional thousand were wounded.
The next afternoon, President Roosevelt addressed a Joint Session of Congress. December 7, 1941, he said, was a “date which will live in infamy.” Japan had attacked several American outposts, making it clear that American people, territories, and interests were in danger. There was no other recourse. From the moment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, “a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”
The president received a standing ovation as the room erupted into cheers, and less than three hours later, he signed the declaration. America was at war, and its military was about to need a lot more pilots.
Chapter 6
/> England, May 1942
Three months into her six-month contract with the Royal Air Force, Jackie had adjusted to life in wartime London. On any given night from her little house behind Harrods department store, she could hear the roar of a bomber flying overhead, antiaircraft guns firing from Hyde Park, and the eerie silence that said something was happening too close for comfort. Some nights she’d sit out on the front step and watch the fighter planes high above the city before going off to some dinner party or a social night playing games of backgammon. With every night potentially her last, there was no reason not to enjoy herself. More important, her hand-selected group of twenty-five women pilots flying with the Air Transport Auxiliary was performing brilliantly. Holding the rank of captain, she fought their administrative battles while her girls—she thought of the women under her command as “her girls”—worked alongside British civilian pilots. They learned their way around the foreign countryside, flying planes from factory to field, between air bases, and then back to the factories when they needed repairs. Jackie was halfway through her time with the ATA Girls when Hap Arnold arrived in London toward the end of May for a series of meetings, among which was one with Jackie.
The issue of women pilots in America had gotten complicated since Jackie had left for England. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hap had given Robert Olds permission to hire fifty more women to fill roles as needed. Jackie had been terribly confused by this since, just weeks earlier, Hap had told her he wasn’t going to need women pilots for months. She couldn’t understand why he’d suddenly decided there was a pilot shortage but was still ignoring her recommendation of a dedicated women’s corps. She’d been so mad she’d hand-delivered a memo to Hap marked “Urgent and Important.” Jackie’s insistence changed Hap’s tune, and he told Robert to make “no plans or open negotiations for hiring women pilots until Miss Jacqueline Cochran has completed her present agreement with the British authorities and has returned to the US.”
Now, months later and with her term in Britain coming to a close, the Army Air Force wanted Jackie with her years of experience to spearhead development and training of a women’s air corps in the United States just as soon as she finished her remaining three months with the RAF. Hap, firmly on her side, would make sure she was the woman in charge.
When Jackie arrived at the RAF airfield for her flight home in the first week of September, she was given an urgent message. General S. H. Frank wanted to see her, so would she please return to the RAF base. She did and waited a full three days for a meeting that turned out to be little more than a polite dinner that had nothing to do with the war. Irritated by the needless delay, she finally made it home late on Thursday, September 10.
The next morning, luxuriating with a restful breakfast while flipping through the New York Times, Jackie stopped at a picture of a woman shaking hands with a two-star general. The headline above the image said, “She Will Direct the Women Ferry Pilots.” The caption read “Mrs. Nancy Harkness Love being congratulated by Maj. Gen. Harold L. George.” The article announced the establishment of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying command. Jackie’s shock quickly turned to anger. This was the top job Hap had promised to her, the job she had been preparing for over the past year, the job her experience in England was meant to inform. And this wasn’t just a memo, it was an announcement in the press. Now everything was confused. Still in a rage, she called Hap, who turned out to be as angry as she was and asked her to come by in the morning. For the rest of the day, memos flew around the upper echelons of the Army Air Force suggesting her months-old proposal for a comprehensive female pilot program be instituted.
Jackie arrived in Hap’s office first thing the following morning, the offending press clipping clasped tightly in her hand.
“I understand you already have women pilots?” she said by way of a greeting.
“I don’t have any,” he insisted.
Jackie demanded to know what had happened. She also wanted Hap to announce that they had been discussing a broad women’s program for more than a year and that the article described an experimental trainer plane ferry group that was a small part of her larger program. She was determined to salvage the situation in her favor.
Hap explained that he had been blindsided. The Ferry Command had gone over his head directly to Secretary of War Henry Stimson with a project he hadn’t approved. It was an act of insubordination as far as he was concerned, and it also explained Jackie’s three-day delay leaving England. General S. H. Frank had called her back from the airfield as a way of delaying her return so the Ferry Command could set up its own program.
Neither knew whether the motivation was ill feeling toward Jackie personally or doubts about her abilities as a pilot, but Hap was determined to get to the bottom of it. With Jackie still present, he called the head of the Air Transport Command, General Harold L. George, and his deputy, General Cyrus Rowlett Smith, into his office. He told them they were to meet with their staffs and Jackie and settle on a program that satisfied her. He also insisted that hers be the only female flying unit, but as much as Jackie wanted full control, she had to say no. If the WAF program was cancelled a day after its announcement, it would only bring negative publicity. They agreed on a compromise: retain the WAFs but limit its activity to ferrying airplanes. Jackie’s own program announced through a War Department press release would be the larger Women’s Flying Training Detachment. The WFTD would be an experiment of sorts, a formal training unit that would put no restrictions on non-combat flying with the goal of showing women were as capable as men in the cockpit. It was a minor distinction, but it made Jackie happy that her girls would be separate from the WAFs who, as far as she was concerned, were little more than a bunch of “society dames.”
Beginning with the names she had earmarked as potential recruits for Robert Olds a year earlier, Jackie scoured through records of pilots looking to find 500 women between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five who could complete their training and be on active flying duty by the end of the following year. Applications streamed in. Jackie tried to interview each woman personally but soon had to farm out the job to assistants who traveled the country in her stead. Only Nancy Harkness Love remained a point of frustration. Jackie didn’t know why it had been Nancy rather than herself who was appointed chief woman pilot, but she was determined that no woman would challenge her command of this program ever again.
The final piece of the puzzle was addressing Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics. Jackie hadn’t given much thought to the business when she’d left for England. She’d figured six months was a short tour, but she’d returned to find the office in disarray. If she was going to devote herself to the WFTD full-time, she would need someone else to manage her cosmetics business. She found her answer in a Mr. Vaughn, a quiet man who implemented her company’s first real management structure. Her company was taken care of, and her female flying unit was taking shape. All Jackie needed now was a place to train her girls.
Chapter 7
Washington, DC, December 1942
“How did you get here so fast?” It was half past six o’clock in the morning, and Hap was amazed to see Jackie walking into his Washington office when he knew she was currently stationed in Texas.
“This had better be important,” she replied, unwilling to waste time on pleasantries.
“Have some coffee,” he offered.
Jackie knew he would only call her for a meeting to deliver bad news, so she’d flown through the night to get whatever it was dealt with sooner rather than later, and his stalling made her uneasy.
Jackie’s Women’s Flying Training Detachment had been formally activated a month earlier on November 15; Floyd had marked the date by sending Jackie his favorite professional headshot of her in her ATA uniform inscribed with “This is a photograph of the one whom I adore.” For the past month, the girls under Jackie’s command had been flying out of Howard Hughes Field near Houston, Texas, but the site left much to be desired. A for
mer civilian training center on lease to the US Army Air Force, it had a grass landing strip, three hangars, and a few small buildings. There were no barracks, no restaurant, no place to even make a quick cup of coffee, and only two toilets. The equipment was no better, a hodgepodge of whatever primary and basic training planes Jackie had been able to get her hands on.
From her office at the Flying Training Command offices in Fort Worth, Jackie had delegated onsite management to Dedie Deaton, a swimming instructor whose cousin worked at Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics. Dedie’s job, as per Jackie’s instructions, was to find a place for the first group of twenty-eight girls to eat and sleep. She was also tasked with overseeing their evening study periods and making sure they visited the beauty parlor once a week; Jackie insisted her girls strike the same balance between professionalism and femininity that she valued for herself. The spartan facilities forced Dedie to get creative. She found the girls spare rooms in nearby homes and arranged for army transport vehicles to bus them to the airport every morning. In spite of their unconventional living situation, the first class of girls to join the WFTD maintained high morale as they sunk their teeth into training.
Fighting for Space Page 9